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Adobe and Nokia pledge $10m for Flash and AIR apps

Mobile PDF rewritten

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Adobe and Nokia are offering developers a Google-size pile of cash as incentive to write applications for Flash Player and AIR running across different types of devices.

The companies today unveil a $10m fund to assist development and marketing of applications that further the Open Screen Project. They are making the announcement at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

Adobe and Nokia will determine the allocation of grants and expect fellow members of the Open Screen Project to add funds in time. Details of who qualifies for a grant will be announced today at the show.

Created last May and led by Adobe, the alliance is as a way to deploy Flash and AIR on a broad range of devices. Other members include LG Electronics and Sony Ericsson, Intel and ARM, Verizon, the BBC, and NBC Universal.

Anup Murarka, Adobe’s director of technology strategy and partner development, told The Reg that Adobe expects the Flash 10 plug-in for the three browsers to be ready by the end of this year. He added there are also "a number of other players who are anxious to see it and do the engineering on their platforms as well".

It’s not clear if this includes Apple, which has rejected Flash on the iPhone and in the iPhone’s Safari browser. Adobe has said that it is collaborating with Apple on this.

Adobe also today plans to release a reworked version of PDF for mobile devices to make it more suited to reading books and online content on readers and smart phones. Adobe Reader Mobile will let you zoom in and pan around pages, and pages will dynamically re-size to fit the size of the screen - making it more like AIR as used by the New York Times'reader.